Conventionally, distributed computing environments often require very complex management schemes for distributing the tasks that constitute the complete job to be performed. The complex management system is responsible for collating the processing results. Such a distributed computing environment requires a linked, dedicated cluster, of computers for performing such processing. The provision of such a purpose built cluster of computers is a relatively expensive undertaking and is typically avoided unless absolutely necessary.
It has been discovered that most computing resources within a company lie dormant for the majority of the time. Alternatively, those computing resources often have spare processing capacity; that is, the percentage utilisation of the processor within those computing resources is relatively low. Schemes have been developed in which those dormant computing resources are utilised by third party applications. For example, the SETI organisation makes software available to a participating user that will access data from a SETI server, process that data as part of a concurrent task on the user's client machine and return the processing results to the SETI server.
However, even within an Intranet, where the employees of a company are all working towards the same general goals, the use of users' machines to perform distributed computing tasks causes concern. Many relatively senior personnel will be privy to very sensitive commercial information. Also, personnel staff will have access to personal data relating to the employees. In such circumstances, the users are very reluctant to allow their computers to be used for Intranet distributed computing.
A solution that addresses these security of privacy issues is a technology that partitions the disk drives of the users' machines. This partitioning allows separate users to operate using the same physical HDD without the risk of another user being above to see or interfere with the data and applications contained within any other partitions on that machine. However, this solution requires significant modifications to be made to the operating system. Any such modifications are clearly undesirable, especially for application developers, rather the system developers, who may have sufficient technical knowledge to effect such modifications.
It is an object of the present invention at least to mitigate some of the problems of the prior art.